“Fake it till you make it,’

“I don’t subscribe to this one,” says my favourite fashion lady and all around awesome for life friend, Lisa Drader Murphy. She is the creative genius designer behind the Turbine fashion brand and the recently launched LMD line (Collection of her own name if you don’t catch the acronym). For more on her visit www.turbine.ca .

I met this marvel of a human through a charity event that she was hosting for a the bursary program Amanda’s Gift through the Nova Scotia Council for the Family. Lisa started her own charity the Turbine Fund through her business. The bursary was a life changer for me, it offered me both financial and moral support in the pursuit of my dreams when I seriously lacked support in this area from anywhere else. I received my Master’s diploma today. Today in many ways, is a day I will never forget. The bursary did more than help me finance university, it connected me to a mentor whom I will forever admire and cherish and draw inspiration from. Lisa and I first connected online to help promote the charity event, and she later she invited me to visit her at her home for a good old fashion sleepover to get to know one another better, and it was one of the best evenings of my adult life. After the first hang out I was hooked. I am like a wet blanket when it comes to finding comfort and sanctuary, a overnight visit eventually would turn into a 3 day week-end retreat and at the risk of outstaying my welcome I could never find myself to be ready to leave her company, always so uplifting, always so much to learn, always so much to think about after spending time with her.

Getting back to the title of this post, during her visit in conversation she said “Fake it till you make it: I don’t subscribe to that one,” and I can’t get it off my mind. She made her statement with an equal amount of dignity and distain. Sitting in my overpriced, cramped and cluttered one bedroom Fort McMurray basement suite chatting with my friend, she dished us a huge reality check in 12 words. I love what she said and how she said it so much. It’s absolutely brilliant. I see now that it was nonsense to believe otherwise.

Lisa was visiting my community for the first time for a guest appearance as a keynote speaker at charity driven fashion fundraiser. I naturally made the connection for her to attend as I wanted to share her with my new community and hope she plants some seeds of inspiration in my new home, like she has in me, every time we spend any amount of time together. She did a whole lot more, this one simple comment effortlessly shattered years and years of faking it till we were making it for my friend and myself. This will no doubt have a massive ripple effect.

Lisa rubs shoulders with celebrities often but she doesn’t get caught up in the glamour of fashion industry, she is downright hardworking, and down-to-earth and she emerges more humble than half of the people I have ever met. The fashion industry isn’t bursting at the seams with both talented and approachable and genuine people. No wonder I hold her in in such a high regard. Lisa has been through a lot. Her history isn’t mine to tell. But I will say she has never once ever led me to believe that she has felt like a victim of circumstance. She has always made the point clear that when life brought her to challenges she had to make choices and for her, empowerment in life is knowing that while choices may not always easy, they are ours for the taking, and each of us always options. Hopelessness and being trapped is a self created issue, it’s not relative to situations or circumstances. Lisa is a leader who leads through her setting standards by her own example. Dream big, but make the dreams real within your means, work hard but make time for meaningful relationships, think things through but follow your gut when the time calls for it and learn to know the difference between intuition and impulse, and all the while reflect constantly along the way and adjust as is required are all-important key messages I have drawn from her from our conversations over the years. Lisa can be counted on to not tell you what you may want to hear. In fact she can be counted on for the opposite. She speaks only her truth and for that I commend her. That is why she likely doesn’t fake anything to make anything. It’s not founded in truth. Faking is false and that fact is unchanging. My brilliant creative and talented friend is 100% correct; we can’t fake anything and expect to it create something of substance.

I had “fake it till I make it” stamped all over me prior to this conversation. I carried this statement all around, repeatedly told it to myself and to my friends. To me the shoe seemed to fit. The idea was that when you feel like crap, the notion of getting dressed up even if you don’t feel like it and getting on with it was somehow going to help it along. Enacting this statement for me was a demonstration in perseverance, a tell tale sign of strength. Lisa shared her truth to us in that moment by bluntly declaring that unsubscribing to this sentiment was empowerment. in my reflections I draw that you can’t ever fix what is not right within yourself by just disguising what is visible on the outside. Coming from a fashion industry person, this is truly deep. Her truth that we as people cannot ever dress up dissatisfaction and expect that disguise to garner any sort of altered outcome is pretty amazing. I won’t lament this statement leaving my repertoire. Its sort of like the iceberg theory, only 10% is above water, is what is seen, the other 90% is what lies underneath the surface and that part is so much greater part of the whole that what is visable. It’s about seeing the surface but knowing what is beneath, its about the bigger picture and understanding that what you don’t see is more often, what is most real and behind what is obvious is where you find what really matters, what must be faced, thus window dressings cannot ever make anything better. “Fake” can not ever manifest something we expect to become “real’.

Looking back at the last 9 months I draw this important perspective into my my personal reflections. My most recent chapters in life learning and personal growth are tough ones. I see now that putting on a strong front, suiting up for battle, or showing a good face didn’t do me any favors, it didn’t change what was underneath the surface, it didn’t fix what was wrong and is did not clear away my dissatisfaction about how choices that were being made on things I did not think were right. I see now that no matter how much I put into fixing what I conceived as problems could not window dress what was really festering beneath the surface. Other people saw what I was trying to hide and what I was really refusing to accept and expose and face. I was not a victim in my circumstance, I was just covering up my ability to choose. I know now that I was lying to myself and continuing to attempt to “fake it to make it,”. My fake it every day didn’t make it better or change the ultimate outcome. I didn’t show what I knew was real and I didn’t face the 90% of what was under the surface. The 10% of what I put forward was fake window dressings and when I started to unveil the truth, it was too late and the consequences of my lack of attempts to take control of my available choices on the issues relating to my circumstance came crushing down on me without mercy.

The fake it till you make it statement is stricken from my narrative, if only to reappear to be debunked. Truth and only truth can bring about the necessary change that we sometimes need in our lives when we reach our pinnacle moments, despite if we find ourselves in good or bad circumstance. If you feel like crap stick in your yoga pants for a day or so. It’s not the end of the world.

Truth means facing the “I feel awful” moments and then as quickly as possible making the honest attempt towards honest reconciliation of how we feel about where we are in that rare moment, and in assessing what we are doing about our circumstance and on making the action plan towards getting where we want to be. We must expose our emotions, our realities, and our truths, no matter how much they may not be aesthetically pleasing to us. It’s the only way to activate inner empowerment, the kind that shines through on the outside, the kind that can initiate the changes we desire within ourselves and the world around us. For me this means success in my future in is based on truth and that concealment will always fail. Moral of this story for me, donning a disguise will never help me attain any real or measurable results, no matter what I package or present myself, choosing genuine truth is the only way to release myself from the things that happen in life that might try to hold me back. Present the truth of the matter and move forward with eyes wide open.

I think when she makes her beautiful designs, from time to time; she cringes at the thought of anyone faking it till they make it in anything she created. She aspires for the women who wear her works of art to face the world and its circumstances with confidence and truth that’s so entrenched on the inside, that it very naturally is visible on the outside when the woman puts on her Turbine for game days.

Please consider making a donation to the Turbine Fund via the website http://www.turbine.ca and know that every dollar donated really does go to those who need it, and the gifts given through the fund really do make meaningful impacts towards empowering women, in Canada and all around the world by motivating people through kindness and helping them to raise above circumstance to reach each recipients full potential. The Turbine Fund is not just offering funding but more so about offering inspiration, food for thought, mentorship and most importantly by planting seeds of empowerment towards making helping those who need a hand up, not a hand out, in hopes that the world can become a better place through acts of compassion and kindness.